We discussed the entwinement of Nazi ideology and economics, the explanation for the apparent irrationality of German military strategy, the comparative backwardness of the German economy in the pre-war period, and the question of 1930s parallels in the post-financial crash era.

This is one of a series of very productive conversations I’ve had with folks on the left about Wages of Destruction.

Another was orchestrated by the editors of Historical Materialism. My response was the short essay, “The sense of a Vacuum”.

I find these conversations particularly helpful and illuminating, because despite the fact that none of the apparatus is made visible in Wages, it was actually written in dialogue with Marxist political economy and historiography of the Third Reich. The single most important influence on the argument was the work of the GDR-historian Dietrich Eichholtz and his multi-volume history of the Nazi war economy.